


buried in a place like this

by thegirl



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Dead People Talking To Other Dead People, Death, I should edit this but I don't wanna, Prophetic Dreams, This is way sadder than I meant it to be. Sorry., crypts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-25
Updated: 2016-09-25
Packaged: 2018-08-17 07:03:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8134705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegirl/pseuds/thegirl
Summary: Prompt: Lyanna's spirit keeps trying to reach her son and, being unable to leave the crypts, sends him dreams urging him to come visit her instead. The Kings of Winter interfere in this, because they are afraid Jon will go join his mother in a permanent fashion, should he dream night after night of a woman's voice whispering for him to come see his mother in the crypts.





	

_Come to me, my darling boy... come to the crypts... come to your mother...come and see me..._

_Stop it, girl,_ Brandon Ice-Eyes snapped at her for what felt like the thousandth time (but it was probably more like the millionth). The girl was doing it again.

She was young, it was true, and she had not had centuries like the rest of them to become accustomed to the darkness. In the beginning, they had all been like her, but usually they were calmed by family – fathers, brothers, uncles, and they settled. Her brother and father had statues, but they were empty, and thus the crypt magic did not work for them.

So the girl was alone, with her ancestors, most of whom had no idea how to comfort a teenage girl who just wanted to see her son. Brandon had had no idea that the crypts would do this to those buried there whilst he was alive, but he remembered that women were usually buried in the godswood, so somebody must have known and tried to spare the Kings of Winter this eternal bother. _Why,_ he thought despairingly, _could her brother not bury her there? She could be with her mother there._

Brandon does know why he didn’t, and he even understands, but sometimes it is really too much.

_But he’s so close,_ her half-voice whispers, _he’s just above my bones. Why can’t he just come and see me, come and see me, let me see his face and hear his voice and-_

_You’re dead,_ Brandon reminds her, perhaps a little too harshly. The girl is only six and ten. (The girl will be only six and ten for eternity.) _He will see naught but a cold statue, of a woman he has been raised to know as his aunt. Let him go._

_No!_ She wails, and sobs that seem to come from no particular source echo around the crypt. Brandon’s neighbour shifts. _No! No! No!_

_I am trying to sleep,_ Edderion the Bridegroom grumbled, _is she still going on about the boy?_

_Of course she is,_ Brandon snaps, _we have another forty years of this - at least._

_He’s... he’s only a child still..._ she whispers, and Brandon can see her repeating the same words, getting stuck on one thought like they sometimes do, for days on end. It is not something that the ghosts are unused to, but Brandon Ice Eyes did not get his moniker for being soft-hearted.

_Please, Lyanna,_ Edrick Snowbeard sighs from further along the tomb, _just try to forget. It is easier, and there is less pain._ The old man was kinder than Brandon would have been if he’d gotten there first. Brandon still thinks of him as an old man, when in fact he was born after Brandon was long dead. He just lived longer, and time is a strange thing down in the darkness.

_No,_ she whimpers, _no. He is alive, your children are long dead. Your sons and daughters are dust and ash, just like you. But my son... my son... he’ll come. He’ll come. He asks about me, even now, he wants to know his mother._

Brandon stifles a rather rude response, and reminds himself of how he had been for his first few years down here. He has no idea how the others could stand him. Moaning all the time about all the things he didn’t do, all the enemies he didn’t crush, all the things he would miss about his own children. So now, he has to be kind.

Or, if not kind, at the very least not cruel.

_Lyanna, he wouldn’t know to come._ Benjen the Bitter mutters, bitterly. Brandon remembers when he was first interred, he had complained about everything for almost a dozen years without even a day’s respite. That had been a proper headache. Now, even _he_ had mellowed, and learned how things were done for those eternally at rest. _We are little more than ghosts. The living cannot hear us._  

_I’ll make him hear me,_ Lyanna mutters, and Brandon feels a heavy lump of foreboding lodge in what used to be his throat.

That night, she begins reaching out to his dreams. Their souls look a little similar, but he is already his own person. He is not just her son, he is a person. _Come_ , she whispers in her brittle half-voice, _come to the crypts. Come to me... Come to me..._

_Stupid girl, Brandon_ spits viciously as he hears her casting her spell on the boy, worming into his dreams _, do you want him dead?_

The answer is no, of course, but she is mad with grief for her own demise, and mad to know the son she only held the once. When Ned comes down here, Brandon Ice-Eyes promises himself for what feels like the thousandth time, she’ll be his problem, and Brandon can finally get some damn rest.

_I just want to see him,_ she snaps, and not for the first time her stubbornness fills Brandon with the desire to kill her again. _I want to feel his touch on my tomb, see his smile, he’ll look like his father..._

_He’ll think you want him to kill himself,_ Brandon snaps, _come to the crypt? That sounds like you are asking him to die. And even if he does, he won’t be buried with us. There is only one bastard buried in this crypt._ Somewhere, deep below them, Brandon Snow shifts from his slumber, still answering to the barb about his birth from so many centuries before.

_Hmm?_ He grumbles, infamously crotchety at being woken, _who calls?_

_The she-bitch,_ his trueborn brother Torrhen, the King Who Knelt, answers _, worry not. She just wants her boy dead._

_I do not!_ Lyanna protests, _I just want to see him._

_I would have thought, girl, that you’d have learnt your lesson about wanting._

Brandon Ice-Eyes stiffens. He knows that voice. He has heard it less than five times since his death, if that, but Lyanna doesn’t know this voice. She doesn’t know the price of her words.

_Shut up,_ she snarls, _this doesn’t concern you, old man._

_She-bitch,_ Torrhen Stark says in a low, cautious voice, _I wouldn’t do that._

_Doesn’t it?_ That old, rough voice still sends chills up his not-spine. _Girl, I know you were told tales of me at your mother’s tit. Heed me: these messages must cease before he acts upon them._

For a moment, silence. And then: _Who are you, old man, to tell me what I must and must not do?_

The presence spreads, like a cloud of dust thrown up at a horse’s hooves; it would choke anyone with half a feeling for the earth, and Brandon knows he won’t be able to stop feeling it for weeks. _I am Bran the Builder. I am the First Man of the First Men. I built the Wall, and Winterfell, and Storm’s End. I watched the end of the world, and I watched it all be born again. I walked with giants, fought Others, feasted mermen and krakens. I am more than you will ever be, and have ever been._

Finally, Lyanna falls quiet.

_The boy is not welcome,_ Brandon the Builder continues, _not until his time has come. You will send no more dreams; beckon him to your side no more._

_But-_

She sounds so small, and so scared. She is six and ten. Brandon Ice-Eyes wishes she was not six and ten. It would be a little easier if she had known at least a little of life before she died, and was sent to this damned place with the rest of them. Brandon had had a daughter who died at six and ten - he had buried her in the godswood, like all sensible lords did - he did not inflict the Kings of Winter with her weeping. But he still missed her, sometimes. Six and ten was such a cruel age to die, just when life was truly beginning.

She is a six and ten, she can learn. She must learn. And yet, that night it begins again: _come to me, come to me my baby,_ she sings high and haunting, _come to me, come to me..._

_NO,_ Bran the Builder drowns out her song, and without meaning to, Brandon Ice-Eyes adds his own voice to the chorus, the first Brandon’s compulsion bringing all his descendants into order of harmony, tenors, bass and alto altogether. _YOU ARE NOT A STARK,_ and Brandon copies, damn him, he repeats, even as Lyanna weeps, _YOU ARE NOT A STARK. THIS IS NOT YOUR PLACE. THIS IS NOT YOUR PLACE._

_Please!_ The girl screams, as the little boy’s reaching consciousness flees their darkness, flees to the world of the living. _Stay! Come to me!_ But he is gone.

_Not yet,_ Bran the Builder vows as the girl screams after her boy. _Not yet._

 Brandon Ice-Eyes sighs as the girl’s cries get ever louder. He is not like some of the others, so used to sleep that it comes easily. No, he has to work for rest. Even now, centuries after he perished, he remembers what it was to be alive. He had needed sleep then – now it is just a tool he uses to wile away eternity. _We’ve another century of this_ , he thinks to himself, and tries to sleep at least a few decades of it away.

(Sleep doesn’t come for a long, long time.)


End file.
